This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

The muse strikes each of us in very different ways. For some of us it strikes often — as it did for Scottish writer Muriel Spark.

During her career, she wrote 22 novels, a few biographies, was a critic and a poet, and influenced some of the greatest writers of the 20th century.

Her muse, what she called “the informed air” is also the title of the collection of essays newly compiled by her best friend and literary executor, Penelope Jardine. Spark died eight years ago, in 2006; this is the first time her essays have been judiciously pulled together in one place. Jardine selected the essays with the aim of explaining the informed air, a phrase, she notes, “Muriel Spark used to explain how things come to us . . . Out of the air.”

She’s organized them in loose categories: Life, Literature, Miscellany and Faith. In their entirety, they help us understand how Spark found her muse — her influences, the connections she made between one writer and another.

Spark was, of course, one of the most modern of voices in 20th century literature. Her best-known novel is, perhaps, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. But her first book, The Comforters, hit the U.K. like a firestorm, examining entertainingly the very necessity of art. We find out in The Informed Air part of the reason she was able to publish it is was because the novelist Graham Greene helped her out financially during its creation.

Article Continued Below

Early on in her career Spark was a poet — a profession, she says, which informed her later novel writing. “I owe to this activity a sense of how to manipulate language and organize sentences and paragraphs (the stanzas of prose) to procure an effect — I have always claimed that I write as a poet, that my novels come under the category of poetics rather than fiction.”

Spark writes in a gloriously matter of fact tone, a tone that only serves to emphasize the complexity and profundity of the ideas she’s expressing. These essays may be light of tone sometimes, but the language is dense and full of meaning.

On love: “Certainly, you can analyse it and expound its various senses and intentions, but there is always something left over, mysteriously hovering between music and meaning.” Like art, then.

In some of the essays, Spark’s efforts throw insight into how art is created — cutting through the mystery and alchemy of creativity and exploring ideas that illuminate the process.

For example, in one of the earlier essays she mentions the Scottish Border Ballads — anonymous songs and poems from ancient times. She was influenced by them, growing up as a child; she notes in another essay that Scottish poet Robbie Burns was influenced by them, as well. And in her essay on Emily Brontë she suggests that Bronte was, too — that somehow she assimilated them into the very fibre of her intellect and being, so that they informed her poetry. The point here is: that a country’s literature can build up, be influenced by what came before, and knowing it gives you a deeper understanding of what you’re reading now.

Here’s another example: She takes a look in another essay at Heathcliff (from Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights) as the most perfect villain in literature. It’s one of many essays on the Brontës included in the collection and each takes a slightly different look at how the sisters (and brother) interacted, created. By looking at each of them, you can see how one influenced the other, how they each interpreted their surroundings and upbringing.

In this volume, which runs to just over 300 pages, is contained some of the sharpest literary thinking of the 20th century.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com